Assuming that there is an interstellar civilization spread out across a volume of ~100 light-years...

I am (), I don't get the reference, can you explain (in relation to my post)?

That's what happens in the Revelation Space universe in a series of books by Alastair Reynolds

And ansibles are a form of instantaneous interstellar communication in Ursula K. LeGuin's books

Sounds like I should them, thank you, user. Sounds like he's the better of the lot, I agree.

He's breddy good

Both useful, thank you.

Universal truth is timeless.

They don't need to.

Time is a product of consciousness' inherent structure, not of the universe itself--assuming that 2 entities are communicating, even by referring to something eternal, they impose on that eternal entity the structures of reason, i.e. succession, i.e. temporality.

Beams would go direct from solar system to solar system.
A ship might intercept one of those beams and it might even be able to transmit to some suns. Trying to contact another ship would be totally hopeless.

100 year old information still has value. Scientific discoveries should be spread.
_Some_ news might still be of interest. I read about political unrest in, say, Romania even though it's effect on me, personally, is nil.

Governing an empire (or a federation or whatever) would be ridiculous. Planets would necessarily be independent -- and on their own. If a blight has struck your crops, not much point in requesting aid if it won't arrive for 30 years. By then, you've either solved the problem yourself or you're dead.

Archives too, birth certificates, death certificates, that sort of thing.

So would it be pointless to try to contact a specific ship more than a few light-hours or light-days away?

>Governing an empire
I doubt, you'd have empires, it would more be like . A bunch of smaller states spread out across star systems, or a collection of star systems.

Definitely.
Broadcasting makes no sense given the immense distances. You have to aim a tight beam at the receiving craft. And when the published shipping schedules are always 30 years out of date, how do you do that?

You couldnt do that

Or an array. A bunch of beams, sending out the same message aimed in 'roughly' the right direction and sending the same message in a series of pulses so at least 1 pulse from 1 transmitter should make contact

Wrong, as the meter is built into the diameter if the planet, repeating solid numbers in meters, miles and Egyptian royal mile.

Pi, golden ration, the speed of light in built mathematically in the pyramid.

Full stop, physicist is universal, so I geometry, frequencies and other LAWS.

:)

Time can be manipulated like pressure.

Is this African wisdom?

For that matter, beyond setting up new colonies, why should there be interstellar ships?
Information can be sent by radio, quicker and at less cost.
Interstellar flight isn't going to be cheap. You're accelerating matter to substantial fractions of lightspeed. Nothing is going to be worth shipping. Even if your solar system was completely out of an essential material like Illudium Phosdex
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Dodgers_in_the_24½th_Century
it would be easier (not to mention faster) to manufacture it by transmutation than to mount an expedition to Planet X.

Yeah but if you're going to communicate then there have to be 2 parties.

The Egyptians were European, my friend.
>independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ancient-egyptians-europeans-related-claims-a7763866.html

Agreed, I imagine you would to pay a lot and have a very good reason for charting a vessel to leave its solar system.

Damnit. Too stoned for corrections.

> I'm the robot when stoned.

>*you would to pay a lot = you would have to pay a lot

A bunch of beams is no more efficient or energy-saving than a single beam slightly dispersed.
You don't realize how huge the distances between stars are.
Even if you knew that a ship was somewhere on the line between star A and star B, the task is still utterly hopeless. It could only be done if your were _on_ a planet of either A or B and aiming at the other one. In that case, you wouldn't have to know precisely where the ship was along that line. The waves would eventually catch up and pass it. But you'd still have to be lucky.

Im "suffering" autism but it's suffering, it's bliss mix with bouts of feeling like I'm going to vomit, the fifth dimension is swirly and it's a little take in.

And just now....I get when Euro time change is better.

How do we manage to send and receive to our current various probes then?

If wormholes were real, could you send information through them? Serious question.

Voyager isn't that far away, in terms of light-speed.

We wrote on gold and sent it off. It "lasting" is a byproduct to the deep.

Yes. But the original question was about communicating between already settled planets.
I imagine that all settled worlds would have antennae permanently pointed towards at least their nearest neighbors.

Once you have interstellar radio there's not much demand for physical transport between worlds.

Even Alastair Reynolds had to assume "magic" Cojoiner technology to make his starships _somewhat_ plausible.

Oh, in that case I get the context. Sorry, I thought we were talking about ships inside the same solar system, not interstellar.

How stoned are you, user?

>Even Alastair Reynolds had to assume "magic" Cojoiner technology to make his starships _somewhat_ plausible.
True, but I guess now it seems that without an efficient and affordable form of interstellar travel there's no possibility of such a civilization forming, which leads to other questions like "assuming that this civilization did not emerge ex nihilo, how could it come into existence?" but that's a broader question about the viability of various untested, theoretical forms of spaceship design.

The farthest is not that far, is moving quite slowly, and not accelerating/manuvering. Position is known to great accuracy and we should be able to send orders until the isotope batteries run down.

Say, six light hours. The closest system, A and B Centauri, is about 38,000 light hours away.

>The Sun is moving around the center of the galaxy
>The Galaxy is moving around the Universe
I'M GETTING MOTION SICKNESS JUST THINGKING ABOUT THIS

Can no one answer me because we just don't know?

If matter can go through and you write a message on a rock and send it through then technically you're sending information through, it depends on what you mean by 'information' I guess. But also we don't have data.

Interstellar flight isn't absolutely impossible -- though we are a looooong way from even considering it. I can imagine fusion rockets reaching 5 or even 10 percent of cee and being able to stop at the far end. Or beamriders with magnetic braking loops.
So we're talking 40 or 80 year voyages. Suspended animation?
Remember, it only has to be done _once_ per star.

Then there'll be a long period, generations, while the colonists reproduce, build an industrial base, and think about launching ships to reach a little further. A millennium? Assume Columbus reached the New World in 1492 and we might (might) be ready to launch in 2492. The colonists would already have the know-how and wouldn't have to start from scratch.

No question it's going to be a slow process (unless physics gets completely overturned). Don't think Star Trek and arriving before the next commercial break.

>I can imagine fusion rockets reaching 5 or even 10 percent of cee and being able to stop at the far end
Where would that kind of fuel supply come from? Hydrogen collected by ramscoops?

Wouldn't there be huge interference? As in, your 'data' might get through, but it would be scrambled.

Sounds even cooler IMO. Think about it, because of the vast distance, even if we can make it outside of our system, you'd be living a frontier life, cyberpunk to boot!

Starting with the assumption that wormholes exist (and can be stabilized so the first rock through doesn't cause it to collapse), then "yes".

Just remember that black holes are _not_ one end of a wormhole. They lead no where except to your death. And even if we managed to manufacture a wormhole, we'd still have to lug one end to another star. After that though, travel would be easy.

Read "The Songs of Distant Earth" by Clarke. The humans had a terrific incentive to develop interstellar flight -- discovering that the Sun was going to blow up in about 1500 years. They managed to launch probes with frozen embryos and robots to raise and educate the colonists.
_Manned_ flight was considered impossible -- until a last-minute (well, last century) discovery changed the situation.
Just remember that the Quantum Ramjet is still fiction.

Poul Anderson wrote several stories about the Kith who travel between the stars and are alienated, by Relativity, from the planet-dwellers. He changed the pseudo-physics rationale which enabled near-lightspeed travel and incorporated some of those tales into "Starfarers", one of his last books. Anderson also wrote the classic "Tau Zero", perhaps the grandest vision of the universe since Stapleton.

>ywn be a chimeric Ultranaut crewing a lighthugger, willingly subjecting yourself to the forces of relativity for decades at a time while replacing all of your organs with machines
why live

Hard science fiction is so much better than soft.

>mfw watching Star Trek after reading Ringworld, The Expanse and Revelation Space

Wrong. We are on the outer side of a vortex. That is why the "universe is expanding", it's time dilation. Read Hawking's "imaginary time" work, brainlet.

Read a book or drop out but DO SOMETHING.

You carry it along. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus
Several showstoppers have been found since the original study but it still seems more feasible than ramscoops. Bussard was _extremely_ over-optimistic and the reaction cross-section of "normal" hydrogen is low. It fuses slowly. Sitting where you are, you're generating more heat per pound than the Sun is. The Sun just happens to be bigger and will live longer. But Larry Niven got some good stories out of the ramscoop concept.

I do nothing and thereby demonstrate my wisdom, fag

I think it's because of the plausibility, for Star Trek and similar franchises you have to suspend disbelief considerably whereas with hard science fiction you have to much less, or in some cases, it is plausible (in the future). Therefore, the excitement of that plausibility mingles with the narrative and produces an overall more enjoyable viewing or reading experience.

I just get annoyed watching Holodeck episodes

They take it too far, I agree. Certainly if the hologram 'becomes real', because 'reasons'.

Watching with a quasi-critical eye,I simply cannot take the concept of the Holodeck seriously anymore. At first I started making my Holodeck posts as a joke ("Why don't they call it X instead of a Holodeck? The name is misleading") but I'm starting to get annoyed whenever anyone uses the Holodeck. I just can't stop thinking about all the plot holes, the unbelievable decisions that people make, the fact that it's possible for the technology to work flawlessly while not responding to controls because of some major spatial anomaly, there's so much about the Holodeck that doesn't make even a little bit of sense. And then there's the fucking Doctor. They put a bunch of EMHs in a cave system to mine dilithium or something, but they can't set up holoprojectors around Voyager? Actually, we know that they CAN and DO do this--in that episode with the Hirogen, we see it done, it's the entire plot--and no amount of handwaving can make me believe that there is some reason that makes sense diegetically NOT to have done this before. And the mobile emitter almost never malfunctions; when it does, they can fix it, no problem. It's even more unbelievable than Geordi's ability to operate on Data's positronic brain without actually being a cybernetics genius like Singh was. Why the fuck can't they make more Datas? Why the fuck can't Data experience emotions but Moriarty can? If a Holodeck replicates matter on demand, why can't the replicate and android? Why does that replicated matter lose cohesion when it leaves the Holodeck if it's replicated, rather than projected? Who decided that the Holodeck was a good idea?

>We are on the outer side of a vortex
>That is why the "universe is expanding"
oh god

Maybe instead of transmitting data, they’ll have ftl capable ships that physically carry data to and from the planets/systems. Sorta like the mail system today

You want _hard_?
Read Hal Clement. "Mission of Gravity", "Needle", "Close to Critical", "Iceworld"
Or Robert Forward. "Dragon's Egg", "Rocheworld"
Charles Sheffield. "The Compete McAndrew"

They make Reynolds look soft as marshmallow.

Will check out
I like Alastair Reynolds because of his use of imagery and his descriptions
Are those writers good qua writers?

See

And then they'll invent some bullshit subatomic particle, or gauge boson for their space magic to work. It makes me 'reeeeee' internally.

You sir are full of excellent references, thank you. I think I'll use my down time to read these, instead of play DF.

>It's a 'graviton or baryon or tetryon or metrion or polaron radiation or particles are the cause/solution of some problem/s' episode

Really long sticks, that they just poke and pull on.

But seriously, a civilization that large should be stable enough to wait a few years to get updates. 100 years would only be from farthest distances to each other. It's probably going to be bunched up with the seat of power in the middle and most important industries will be only a few years out of communication.

>Really long sticks, that they just poke and pull on.
How would this work? If you had a 10-lightyear-long rod and you pushed one end, how long would it take for the other end to move?

I like 'em. Start with "Mission of Gravity". You won't find a single modern "hard" SF writer who won't hold that up as the sort of classic he aspires to write.
Editions since about 1990 have included "Whirligig World", an article Clement wrote about the process he went through to create Mesklin.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesklin

>How do we manage to send and receive to our current various probes then?

youtube.com/watch?v=FzRP1qdwPKw

Good video(s) (see part 2 as well) if his voice dosen't make you stab your ears out.

So are you saying ftl is inherently "magical"? Isn't that unscientific?

>muh red matter

The rod would move at the speed of SOUND in what ever material the rod is made of... it is a troll science answer.

Sort of like the prison planet in Alien?

Thanks, user.

I actually know what you mean and I pretty much agree, but you've gotta realize you sound fucking schizophrenic.

In terms of protons, neutrons, and eletrons, a human is computationally equivalent to a rock. Of course in terms of humans and rocks, a human is able to do all sorts of complex things by computing in the brain, a rock is a rock, it doesn't do anything. The lower you go the higher chance you hit a level where everything breaks down and becomes equal. And that isn't necessarily even the last layer (though it may be the last one that matters to you as something existing on that layer)

Why not just slow down consciousness. You would hardly notice a 100 year lag if your consciousness was slowed down ten billion times.

uh...no, I'm pretty sure you're on acid

Oh, yeah. I once heard a writer talking about scripting a ST:TNG episode.
Picard says: blah, blah, blah
Giordi says: We'll have to re-align....

I'm not making this up. The script literally reads "insert technobabble here"!

Shows how cookie-cutter the plots were. No point making up all those words until everyone had signed off and production has begun.

Possibly through manipulating quantumly entangled particles, where a change in one immediately effects a change in the other, no matter the distance.

No, they just write "TECH" in there. They have specialized writing staff to come up with what goes in there and a specialized way of working it into the story.

Thoughts on Greg Bear?

Should've just got them to ad-lib for the fun of it.

Still though, that feels somewhat lackluster, no?

Yes, it does feel somewhat lackluster

Which is why I like it hard; all euphemism fully intended.

any tech thats beyond the current conceivably possible tech is pretty reasonably considered magic. Really, if harry potter style magic existed, of course we wouldn't call it magic, or at least if we did, it would lose its meaning as being something special, its just an everyday part of life.

There's likely lots still we think is impossible but requires a greater command of physics in order to achieve. We don't even know for sure if quantum fluctuations are the lowest level of reality. I'd hazard a guess theres no fucking way thats the case, and I wouldn't be slightly surprised if hundreds of layers of abstraction exist between us and the raw, computationally irreducible information that composes everything. Maybe its just the planck length but unless our universe has some intelligent creator (simulation counts) then I personally think its unlikely that is the lowest level. Since our understandings of time and space break down at lower levels though, the possibility is open for entire civilizations to exist on timescales completely unrelatable to us. I'm suggesting that for even a microsecond of time to pass for us, may be trillions of years and history and all sorts of shit going down at lower levels. Why wouldn't we know any of this? Look at us, despite all our complexity, at a population level we break down to normal distributions and fairly basic systems. Enough humans over enough area over enough time would emerge a physical system as the result of all their interaction.

>tfw no hard-SF-appreciating gf

I've covered this in other Veeky Forums threads. I can only recommend learning something about Relativity. Martin Gardner wrote a good book. No math. "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene also covers it.
I posted on another thread a few hours ago.
Relativity may not be the Final Theory but whatever replaces it will make only subtle changes, just as Einstein corrected Newton only under extreme conditions. FTL would pretty well shatter _everything_ we know, everything we've learned from experiments.
"Magical" in the sense that there's not a scintilla of evidence for it and quite a lot against. If you showed me that you could levitate by sheer will-power I'd concede that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy." But not until then. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Sagan.

Or worse yet:
>tfw no physicist/mathematician hard-SF-appreciating gf
Satisfaction shall never come.

I've read good Bear and bad Bear.
He's not as "hard" as Benford or Brin.
"Eon" is pretty far out. Heavy technobabble. Can't imagine how a hand-held meter could measure the local value of Pi.
(I saw a joke several years ago. Bear had required heart surgery For real!. The surgeon has the organ opened up and he exclaims "Mi'god! There are seven chambers and the 7th one goes on forever!")

>The surgeon has the organ opened up and he exclaims "Mi'god! There are seven chambers and the 7th one goes on forever!"
I laughed out loud
I read Eon over the summer and it was...interesting. "Far out' is a good description. That scene where the administrator on the asteroid fucks the hot physicist chick really didn't impress me, but that's SF for you.

~100 light years implies FTL travel, data carrying systems (i.e, data ships) and other vessels transfer the data by downloading segments and then traveling to another system and then uploading them, its really not hard, this does mean that 1. information in each system is easy to control and 2. that each system is highly localized, people forget that until the advent of the printing press and trains, people rarely talked to people outside of their immediate walking area (about 80-100km or 60 miles for you yanks), and hell until the advent of the internet all information came from a few select sources (papers and news stations), why do you think populations were so easy to manipulate then compared to now.

>~100 light years implies FTL travel,
Why?

That's another enjoyable factor to it, the authors of hardest are usually the most qualified; often astrophysicists with doctorates. So you know by purchasing their work, you're supporting a like-minded academic.

because at those distances to call human civilization a single civilization means that their must be a reasonable amount of time between colonies (few months to a year max from center to outer) otherwise it would be multiple civilizations, not 1. 10 light years could be achievable but the same method would apply, hell i believe NASA has ideas like this for mars.

>(few months to a year max from center to outer) otherwise it would be multiple civilizations, not 1
Are you pulling this metric out of your ass or is there a reason for this?

I doubt intersystem 'empires' would exist and if they did, it would be local systems.